Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln barely survived this week’s runoff election, after MoveOn.org mobilized against her and Big Labor funneled $10 million to defeat the two-term incumbent. Both accused her of centrist sins ranging from opposing the public option in health-care reform to opposing "card check."
We’re all familiar with the factional fights among Republicans, the party purges, and rabid RINO (a.k.a. Republican in Name Only) hunting. What’s gotten far less attention is the still emerging ideological blood-sport of DINO hunting—but it’s a fever that’s catching among the activist class.
After all, Lincoln wasn’t the only Dem in a tough fight with the left this week. Hawkish California Congresswoman Jane Harman was under fire from progressive candidate Mary Winograd in her primary, arguing along the same lines that dispatched Joe Lieberman in 2006. Even Nancy Pelosi found herself heckled by “progressive” protesters at America’s Future Now!, for being insufficiently liberal when it came to health care—a concept that would make many a conservative’s head spin.
The attacks serve as a reminder of the through-the-looking glass political era we’re living in, in which conservatives are convinced that President Obama is a socialist, while liberals call him a corporate sellout. The right trades anecdotes about Obama’s intentional undermining of the War on Terror, while the left accuses him of callously continuing the Bush administration’s War on Terror policies. These narratives are logically incompatible, and yet they’re simultaneously dominating the national debate. All the while, incumbent Democrats decline in the polls.
In the past, the conservative Club for Growth had the market cornered on primary challenges to same-party centrists in swing districts. Last year, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee began playing the same game, raising money to run ads against centrist Blue Dog Democrats in their own districts. “Blue Dog Democrats are wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America,” said co-founder Adam Green in a press release. “And they will pay a political price back home for putting their corporate contributors ahead of their constituents who want reform.”
Saturday, June 12, 2010
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